March 31, 2005

I’ve been reading a lot over the last few weeks about “customer evangelists”, “citizen marketers”, and the like. The basic thrust of the reading has been about turning happy customers into folks who will go out and shout to the world about how great your company is.

Partly I think this is great because by definition you have to be making a lot of customers happy before you’ll reach the few who will really make some waves in your behalf. And while I believe that there is good intent behind the discussions, part of it seems disingenuous. Forced, almost. Maybe I'm just jaded.

Webmail.us Testimonials

There were a lot of things that I liked about Webmail.us before I started here. Not least of which was a great page full of testimonials. I remember reading the one from MacGurus.com where they talked about actually being kicked off of other email providers because their domain was the victim of so much spam. Between that and the demo, I knew that the basic product was excellent.

We have an unofficial policy about testimonials here: if someone sends us an email to support thanking us profusely for our help, we ask if they would be willing to contribute a testimonial. If they send one in, I proofread it. I make minor spelling and wording changes and have a web developer post it. Fairly simple & we try not to force someone to feel something if they haven’t already expressed a lot of happiness.

I spent more hours than I care to admit surfing blogs one week not too long ago. I had made a PubSub feed on the words “customer service”. I read through everything it hit—hundreds of items. My goal was to find patterns of root causes of customer’s reactions to customer service experiences. Here is what I can share, in order of importance:

#1 Successfully resolving the problem

#2 Meeting explicit or implied commitments

#3 Responding in a context-appropriate amount of time

Other things like politeness, for example, only seemed to be mentioned if one of these core things stood out as really good or really bad.

So the extremely happy customers come from going beyond the scope of the problem, from exceeding commitments, and from responding more quickly than a customer expected.

February 21, 2005

I mentioned the other day that
proactive customer support would be one of the things we’d be looking to
implement here at Webmail.us. I thought
it might be useful to explain what I meant.

Reactive Support

This is your normal, everyday technical and customer
support. You realize you have a
problem. You get frustrated. When you get frustrated enough, you send
someone an email or pick up a phone and call.

Providing this kind of support is a necessity for many
businesses. Phone-based support has
earned a bad reputation—deservingly low according to many. That’s why we all wait until our frustration
with a problem is greater than the frustration we think we will experience when
we call the technical support line. I think that our phone-based support at Webmail.us could be stronger, but
that’s not what I’m writing about today.

Proactive Support

Often a company is in a position to either predict or notice
a problem in behalf of a customer. When
that happens, the company can move to resolve the issue in the customer’s
behalf and notify the customer about what was done. Or perhaps the company makes contact with the customer to explain
what the customer might need to do to prevent or resolve their problem.

For us, this means watching our email log data. If we see a lot of sending errors from a
certain IP address it might tell us that kaverett@notreal.webmail.us
hasn’t set up his email program to use SMTP authentication properly—required on
our system. There are a dozen other
customer problems that we might detect with the right automated tools. Once we know about a problem we can contact
our customer’s email administrator and give them a head’s up. We’re working now on the back-end tools that
will help us be proactive. Give us a
few weeks and months and you’ll hear some great stories.

Who Else Should Be Doing This?

Any company that has a product “wired” to the customer. On-Star(R) should tie in to a modern
car’s computer system (using ODB-II) and call me when I’m starting to
get bad gas mileage and need to get a tune-up. ISP’s should notice when their customers are infected with a virus or
are acting as spam zombies and help them disinfect.

The Future

I don’t think Webmail.us will be alone in this effort. I just think we’ll be one of the very
first. Someday, this type of service
may be so commonplace that it will be expected in the same way we now expect a
fast-food restaurant to upsell us to a large size drink.